Adrian
It seemed to be going well, the man was beggining to ask hypotheticals about If he helped us. That is most of the time promising.
Of course, then the short and vulgar man, who was begging for, what was it? apprenticeship. He went ballistic on the grey-cloak, and now I figured that the chances just dropped significantly.
I turn to the plasma wizard and put my hands on his shoulders. Then I say, “Shut up” I then move my right hand across his face in slap.

I turn back to the grey-cloaked man and say, “I can’t know what you could gain. Maybe some piece of mindthat you didn’t let us die. I honestly don’t know. But I do know that when we get out of here, we’ll make towards that safe area, and we’ll do the best we can getting there, and helping the people on the way.”

I’m kind of screwed this week. You see, I have a math exam on Wednesday, and a physics assignment due on the same day. And I have a math and a physics assignment both due on Thursday. Then I have a physics exam on Friday. Yeah…

but the shock would NOT stop the slap from impacting.

I don’t think he explicitly said it stopped your slap. He got slapped, and you got shocked.

How does firmly asserting the desire for you to shut up, without hitting you, POSSIBLY bring you to use leathal force?

That is kind of overreacting, yeah. Unless Nihil is a murderous psychopath or something.

Biography: His father being one of the strongest Magi, he had a lot of expectations to fill, training day and day out at the age of 7, not many kids even knew they were Magi then, but his dad would make him miss school everyday, he eventually started homeschooling him. When he was 13 his dad was assassinated. 3 years later, he mastered his fathers’ spells and set out, seeking vengeance.

Also, regarding dragons… These are the main colors, along with their corresponding breath weapons:
Red – Fire and heat, occasionally with bits of burning oil.
Blue – Freezing wind and cold mist mingled with ice crystals.
Green – Corrosive or toxic semi-liquid mist.
Yellow – Streams of electricity.
White – Blasts of kinetic force.
Black – Blasts of energy that destroy structure on a microscopic level, i.e. disintegration. Less raw damage than a white dragon’s breath but harder to recover from.
Purple – Blasts of pure magic. Doesn’t deal much damage but disrupts magic, so it weakens spells and is extra harmful to incorporeal creatures.

Mixed-breed dragons may have a mix of their parents’ breath weapons.

Due to genetic variations and stuff, a dragon’s scale color sometimes doesn’t match its breath weapon. For example, a blue-scaled dragon may breathe blue fire rather than ice. But for simplicity, a dragon of one scale color should be assumed to have its usual breath weapon unless noted otherwise.

Also, I’m not going to distinguish between chromatic and metallic dragons or whatever. Any dragon can be of any alignment. Their scales may have a variety of textures, some metallic, some crystalline, etc.

In PM, Minnakht brought up an interesting point, a point that you physics-minded people might want to see:

If something or someone is hit with a projectile which has a bunch of kinetic energy (or momentum – momentum might be better), then, if the projectile doesn’t penetrate the target, it will nonetheless impart that momentum to the impactee to preserve it – either because both objects flying together in a crumpled heap, or more like a Newton’s cradle.
And then there’s mass. Even powerful people have limited mass – often pretty low mass, with them taking human or similar forms.
So if a ton of bricks flying at, say, forty meters per second hits a standing super-hard human (say, eighty kilograms), then the end result should be a 1080 kilogram mass of stuff flying at like thirty-seven meters per second – something around that.
If you don’t dodge the projectile itself, you are getting a bunch of kinetic energy, and you can’t just do an universal ‘resist magic’ check to not get that energy. Unless you have telepathy or some other zero-point form of movement, or wings, then you have to hurtle through the air until you lose the energy on collision with something and/or air resistance.
And that’s a very fine exploit from where I stand. Telepathy allows a magic resistance. A magaton punch from Lucinda doesn’t, since all the magic that works just accelerates her fist – none of it actually touches another person, it’s all physics.

This is my response:

I gotta admit, it did take me a few minutes to think of a proper explanation for this one. But an exploit like this has always been “fixed”, and not just in my setting too. For example, look at Superman. He doesn’t weigh much, about the same as an ordinary person. But if you throw a ton of bricks moving at 40 m/s at Superman, chances are he’s just gonna budge very slightly. Also, in Bleach, people often have the power to cut apart buildings with single sword swings, and they shrug off such blows all the time. So an exploit like that never existed; I just didn’t provide a proper explanation until now.
Normally, we have this thing called mass. But that’s actually three separate quantities: active gravitational mass, which affects the gravitational force the object exerts on other objects; passive gravitational mass, which affects the gravitational force the object experiences in response to other objects; and inertial mass, which determines how the object accelerates when a force acts on it. Normally, in real life, all three of those masses happen to be the same. But this need not to be the same in other settings. Even in real life, if you take some other force like electromagnetism, the passive and active “electrical mass”, i.e. charge, of an object is not necessarily the same as its inertial mass.
Now, let’s say we have some powerful humanoid creature with super toughness and strength. It doesn’t weigh much more than a human. When it punches something, it doesn’t move very quickly, and its fist isn’t very massive, yet it hits much harder than usual. How, you may ask? The simple solution is that the creature’s magic temporarily increases its inertial mass, but not passive and active gravitational masses. And it’s the inertial mass that momentum and kinetic energy are concerned with. Thus, the supernatural bruiser can hit very hard while not being very heavy or moving very fast. The creature’s magical increase in inertial mass can be adjusted to some degree, since it can choose how hard to hit with its super strength.
A similar principle applies if you hit the creature with a ton of bricks or some other very fast, very heavy object. Sure, the creature doesn’t weigh very much as its gravitational mass is pretty low, but due to super toughness its inertial mass gets supernaturally increased. Hence, it doesn’t budge much when the heavy object hits it. Of course, not all creatures can do this; only super tough and strong ones can. Other creatures can dodge, or teleport, or phase, or let the projectile just pass relatively harmlessly through them.
If the projectile has a lot of kinetic energy, and the creature doesn’t budge much when struck, kinetic energy has to be dissipated. If the projectile shatters, most of the kinetic energy goes to the individual little pieces. If it doesn’t shatter, or even deform, the energy gets dissipated to heat and ambient magic. The conservation of energy isn’t much of a problem here. Although… Gravitational potential energy is determined by gravitational mass, while kinetic energy is determined by inertial mass, so there may need to be some details that should be worked out. But I’m too lazy to do that at the moment. And besides, energy conservation works with electromagnetism, doesn’t it? Electrical potential energy depends on “electrical mass” or charge, while kinetic energy still depends on inertial mass.

Or you might want to vote for the option you feel is more fair. It won’t do anything, but I’ll appreciate it if you voice your opinion.

Primary Name: Bill
Other Names: Bill Barret Wallace Pierce “I like names” Blenter
Class: Shifter
Species: Half-silver dragon scarab beetle
Gender: Male
Age: 26
Human Appearance: Negro. Pretty muscular. Clean-shaven, with close-cropped hair. The problem with non-white characters is that you don’t really have a choice of hair color… Anyway, Bill wears a white business suit with a blue shirt, oddly enough. The shirt is purple sometimes. As a proper negro, Bill has dope gangsta bling-bling, with all the genuine cubic zirconia.
True Appearance: Well… judging by the description, it’s a small (a few centimeters across) beetle with the shining, resilient scales of a silver dragon. The scarab’s wing covers have scales on them, the underside of the beetle has scales on it… there isn’t a tail, though.
Personality: Bill is an amiable fellow with oddly misplaced priorities. He likes playing chess, shoes, and judging by the amount of crosses he has on him, must be pretty religious, even if he doesn’t participate in religion much. Loyal in a quite fierce way.
Skills: Bill is so gangsta, he can fire a pistol while holding it sideways and miss only seven times out of ten. When he holds a pistol normally, he is a good shot as well. He’s also a chess player, decent cook – a man of many talents.
Spells and Abilities:

Basic spells:
Zero-point kinesis: Bill can attach force vectors to himself to move without a surface to push off of. Even in vacuum, he could move in any direction he wanted. Of course, he’d suffocate in there, so it’s kind of a moot point.
Unlike Lucinda, he can’t attach any vectors to anything that isn’t him, however close it is. Bummer.
Sternacid: Bill can produce an extremely corrosive, slightly gelatinous, purple liquid which eats away at any living being which is not him. If Bill feeds the liquid more magic, the liquid starts being on fire, burning the magic to do fire AND corrosion damage – and it doesn’t burn itself away as long as it has the magic flow. Better yet, that stuff’s sticky in a specific way – it adheres to surfaces, but instead of joining two coated surfaces together, it makes them have considerably less relative friction, on account of its cohesion being bad. As it burns, it makes acrid, corrosive, choking fumes.
All in all, for dead things (and Bill), it’s lube. For living things, it’s corrosive lubricant. For enemies, it’s corrosive lubricant napalm with gas – all the chemical warfare one could need.

Basic abilities:

Mass: As a human, Bill weighs about eighty kilograms. In his true form, he usually weighs less, but not always – it might be shifting of inertial mass anyone is capable of, or it might be a quirk of his transformation. Of course, when Bill is an eighty-kilogram beetle, he can’t really move on his tiny beetle legs.
Reflection: Being a silver dragon, Bill has silver scales. Those act like a mirror to light and similarly to magic, just less effectively so – they can only reflect a flat amount of magic at once, the rest goes through.
Silver: Being a silver dragon, Bill is hated by werewolves, demons, vampires and whatever else happens to be vulnerable to silver. Unless it happens to not be vulnerable to silver.
Breath: I don’t even know what breath weapon do silver dragons have in your version. Whatever it is, Bill can do it. Due to Bill’s size, the emanation is very focused – it has all the power of a Player Character’s ability in something which has size comparable to the flame of a lighter.
Slow viewpoint: Beetles don’t really have much of a lifespan. They perceive the world in smaller intervals, so it seems longer. A fly watching an old-timey movie noticed the blank screens – there were only 24 frames per second with nothing between them, and while humans didn’t notice, the fly did. Which is also why the fly notices you trying to swat it and buzzes away – it’s got better reaction time.

Advanced:
Metal Slug: Bill can further change his shape to become more draconic – although he keeps being tailless. This draconic form is special, though – by pressing his limbs against his body, Bill becomes completely cylindrical and pointy at one end. (’s kinda like this guy.) Like that, he’s less than a centimeter wide and only maybe two centimeters long – like a pinky finger from the second joint downwards. This transformation, aside from shape, changes Bill’s body into pure metal – usually adamantine with a thin film of silverscale on it, keeping it alive despite being inorganic due to the soul being there. While as a scarab Bill is already really small and tough, going Metal Slug makes him even smaller and tougher, which is an useful tactic for turtling – most of the brunt of attacks goes around Bill, since he doesn’t have much surface to take them at all, and the small part that hits him hits a solid metal body. Well, it’s not exactly solid – it would be if there were none of those crevices between limbs and body.
Warpholes: Bill can make a pair of them. He can set them up up to several centimeters away from himself, they stay up for a few seconds after being made before blinking out of existence, instantly blink out after transferring one solid thing through, and they’re tiny. All in all, a good way to get through a standard-thickness window in his scarab form. With enough strain, Bill could set the pair of warpholes on the different sides of a standard-thickness wall to get through it!

Possessions: Pistols – five of them, Bill being a fan of New York-equivalent reload. Some homies, and if cellphones still exist, homies are accessible like that (okay, that’s not a possession, scratch that). He also carries a few human skulls around. Also with genuine cubic zirconias in them.
Faction: None. His own wasn’t ever really meaningful.
Biography: Utopia is a society with lots of conflicts. Bill grew up in it, and when he was young, he was in a gang. The gang was a mostly human (or rather ‘shifter with lame form’) one, and thoroughly ineffectual – going against some other gang, the gang’s boss was killed and that was the end of it. The remainder of the gang’s members just went on to be normal people, meeting every Friday-equivalent in a bar.

Oh, goddammit. At least tell me when you edit a post, will you?! I don’t check it if I don’t see any new replies!

Half-silver dragon scarab beetle

Extraordinary creatures require extraordinary backstories. A half silver dragon, half scarab beetle is only plausible if you make a plausible story of how such a creature came to be, like BC did with his half ice (blue) dragon, half incorporeal fire demon. If you’re going to munchkin, I might as well make it difficult for you.

genuine cubic zirconia

I’ll assume that it’s not zirconium dioxide but some Nexus equivalent.

Well… judging by the description, it’s a small (a few centimeters across) beetle

Since they started off as humans, most creatures aren’t that far off from human size. Even hydrioths have vulnerable cores that require more or less human-sized bodies for protection. Hence I’m not very comfortable with the idea that any creature’s effective full size is less than that of a human head. At least you didn’t try to make something the size of, say, a virus, but it’s quite obvious to me that you’re making something of that size purely for the sake of optimization, so you can just shrug off the attacks of any potential future bosses while burrowing through their skulls. That, of course, annoys me. I might allow someone else to have a character like that, but not you, considering what you did or tried to do in previous games. If you hate my rules so much, why do you even bother signing up?

From a biological point of view, I’ll say that I don’t like such extremely small creatures because it’s generally not easy to pack a lot of power and/or intelligence into things that small. The rules may be more lax when it comes to spiritual beings, but this game doesn’t have anything like that at the moment. No, all the human-turned ghosts and wraiths and stuff here are still technically mortal; true Spirits are much different. True, a soul may be contained in some tiny magical object, but said object isn’t its body; being its body requires something much more complex than simple containment, something probably too small to pull off in an extremely small container given the current developments in magitech.

Let me make something clear here. I am a hypocrite, and I really don’t care if you call me out on it. I am the only one allowed to blatantly munchkin in my games; all other attempts will be met with great resistance. I do want something resembling a half-coherent plot in my game, even if one not yet planned out, and I at least trust myself to not ruin it when one does form out of either the players’ imaginations or my own. That, and I have my ego; I won’t bother to hide it. There are other reasons too, reasons that I don’t want to spend the effort trying to explain.

Bill can attach force vectors

Lucinda

This makes me paranoid. You’re up to something; you must be up to something.

eats away at any living being which is not him

It’s awfully hard for a chemical to be programmed to automatically recognize and selectively ignore anything that contains a soul. Especially since the boundary between living and nonliving can be blurred in a lot of ways. Hence, such a chemical is likely to just eat away at anything it touches other than your character.

it might be shifting of inertial mass anyone is capable of, or it might be a quirk of his transformation

I guess you missed that post of mine explaining shapeshifter baggage some pages ago?

Being a silver dragon, Bill has silver scales. Those act like a mirror to light and similarly to magic, just less effectively so – they can only reflect a flat amount of magic at once, the rest goes through.

Nope. Silver dragons are just white dragons whose scales have metallic tints. Their scales have no intrinsic magic reflective properties, unless they have advanced abilities that do just that.

werewolves, demons, vampires and whatever else happens to be vulnerable to silver

Well, I don’t know. Werewolves may be weakened when touched by silver, though I doubt the two people already playing werewolf characters will like that. Vampires and demons are not vulnerable to silver because I personally haven’t seen too many works in which they are.

I don’t even know what breath weapon do silver dragons have in your version.

Silver dragons are white dragons. Hence, force.

Beetles don’t really have much of a lifespan.

Human-turned magical beetle monsters do have lifespans comparable to humans. Your point is moot.

Warpholes

No. I may allow other people to have portal-making or otherwise spacetime-bending abilities, but not you. Never you.

You know what? Do you know how much time I spend combing over your character sheets for exploits, time that I’d rather spend doing something else? If you don’t like my rules, I don’t see why you’re signing up, unless you’re the kind of egocentric person who absolutely must change everyone to think like you. You don’t see me doing that to other people’s games, do you? You’re one of my close acquaintances on Kongregate, but I’m starting to think that your presence is more trouble than it’s worth.

EDIT: Dammit, you just took an hour out of my life. I wanted to post something before going to sleep, and I wanted to go to sleep at least reasonably early tonight. But it’s almost 2 AM, and the post is only half done, so you’ve ruined my chance to do either. Since it’s this late, I’ll have to get up pretty late tomorrow, so I can’t post early tomorrow either. And since I haven’t been able to post for the past few days, putting it off for another day might just be the catalyst that causes the game to stagnate. And this whole discussion is just bait for people like Captain_Catface to snipe at me with comments that are annoying even if I don’t respond to them, especially when I’m in a bad mood. And now I’m tired, eyes sore, and going to bed with a bad metaphysical taste in my mouth (anyone who makes a sexual joke out of this sentence receives two strikes out of the three that result in a ban). Nice going, genius.

You know what? Do you know how much time I spend combing over your character sheets for exploits,

All the time more than necessary?

but I’m starting to think that your presence is more trouble than it’s worth.

So far, all the ‘trouble’ you have stems not from my presence, but rather from you disallowing it – so it’s all self-inflicted. You could simply say ‘Yes’ and not trouble yourself, or simply say ‘No’ and not trouble yourself. Writing up a wall of text for everything is unnecessary.
In terms of actual presence, I don’t feel there is much of it, if there is any at all. I’m not in your games and we have little contact otherwise as well.

EDIT: Dammit, you just took an hour out of my life. I wanted to post something before going to sleep, and I wanted to go to sleep at least reasonably early tonight. But it’s almost 2 AM, and the post is only half done, so you’ve ruined my chance to do either. Since it’s this late, I’ll have to get up pretty late tomorrow, so I can’t post early tomorrow either. And since I haven’t been able to post for the past few days, putting it off for another day might just be the catalyst that causes the game to stagnate. And this whole discussion is just bait for people like Captain_Catface to snipe at me with comments that are annoying even if I don’t respond to them, especially when I’m in a bad mood. And now I’m tired, eyes sore, and going to bed with a bad metaphysical taste in my mouth (anyone who makes a sexual joke out of this sentence receives two strikes out of the three that result in a ban). Nice going, genius.

I refuse to believe this part was anything other than self-addressed, blaming your compulsion.

I’ll assume that it’s not zirconium dioxide but some Nexus equivalent.

It’s a fake diamond Nexus equivalent. People use those for jewelry when they buy surprisingly cheap ‘diamond’-equivalent jewelry, often without knowing it.

This makes me paranoid. You’re up to something; you must be up to something.

’s just an useful ability because it lets me fly without any biological implements like wings or anything. Beetle form transportation would be incredibly cumbersome without it.

I guess you missed that post of mine explaining shapeshifter baggage some pages ago?

To be honest, it was your response to my earlier query that inspired me here. If anyone can change inertial mass as part of that universal magic resistance check, why not include that?

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